


Sealing the Deal

by SectoBoss



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alcohol, Bill tries to make a deal with Stan, Dreaming, Gen, Set six months after Ford disappears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 20:53:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4891900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His brother’s been gone for six months now, and Stan is beginning to think he’ll never see him again. Then, out of the blue, he comes across a strange creature in his dreams that seems to know the key to getting Ford back. But can Bill Cipher be trusted?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sealing the Deal

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not sure if Stan and Bill could ever have met up, seeing as Bill seems to need some kind of incantation to bring him into the world, but I like to think they could have.

Stanley Pines knew it was Sunday morning because he didn’t wake up in his bed. Truth be told, he barely woke up – ‘came to’ might be a better way of putting it. He shook his head blearily and looked around, wincing at the crick that the armrest of the old sofa had put into his neck over the course of the night.

The familiar scenery of his brother’s house swam around him, fogged by the raging headache that was battering at his temples. It was still his brother’s house in his head, even though the new sign outside read ‘Mystery Shack’ (although it might not for much longer, the ‘S’ was already coming loose). It had only been six months since Ford had disappeared. Not long enough for Stan to give up hope and start thinking of the building as his own.

He groaned and shifted himself upright on the sofa, the old springs creaking under his weight. On the floor next to him, just within arm’s reach, stood a mostly-empty bottle of Wild Turkey. An eighth of an inch of clear golden-brown liquid still sat in the bottom of the bottle and Stan reached out for it thirstily. This was a bad decision, he knew, but he’d been making bad decisions for over a decade now and liked to think he had become something of a connoisseur of them.

The alcohol hit the back of his throat like a branding iron and burned its way down to his stomach. He gasped, coughed, choked a little and nearly dropped the bottle. Recovering, he set it down carefully on the little table next to the sofa and sat back heavily, letting the booze do its work to fight off the nasty hangover from the night before.

This was what his Sunday mornings were like now. He would shoo out the last of his customers on Saturday afternoon, go down into town to pick up groceries for the week ahead , and inevitably pick up a bottle of something while he was down there. Then he would come back to his brother’s house – his house – and throw off his jacket, sit down in front of the television and drink himself into a stupor. The Shack didn’t open on Sundays. Saturday was therefore his night off. The one night of the week where he could sink into unconsciousness without having to see is brother’s terrified face as he was sucked through that circle of light every damn time he closed his eyes.

The television was still on, he noticed with disinterest, burbling out an early-morning news report through its ancient speakers and cracked screen. A man with too much product in his hair was sat behind a desk with a severe expression and yammering on about the sorry state of the world. Unemployment was up. Crime was up. The Soviets were in Afghanistan, for all the good it was doing them. That idiot in the White House was still unaccountably in charge of things. Stan sighed. It was all too depressing for him. He fished around for the remote, couldn’t find it, hauled himself to his feet and turned the TV off.

“Well, you’re up now. Might as well do something with your day,” he muttered to himself. “Hey! You could mow the lawn! Paint the fence!” he laughed. It was a dry, brittle laugh.

First sign of madness, talking to yourself. Answering back was the second. _What’s the third?_ , he wondered idly as he tramped into the kitchen to fix himself some breakfast. _Throwing your brother into a portal,_ an unpleasant part of his brain answered. _And the fourth is trying to get him back._

Bacon and eggs for breakfast, which would have been unimaginable just six months ago. Back then he’d be lucky if breakfast was a cup of coffee in a roadside diner, and maybe a biscuit from a pack he’d shoplifted from a local supermarket. Now he lived in the lap of comparative luxury, even if the price of said life was a bit too high for his liking. It was like one of his own terrible TV adverts, he thought with a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh: “All this can be yours, and for the low, low price of just one twin brother!” He gulped down a mouthful of thick, black coffee, letting the caffeine and the alcohol go to war over his brain. The sooner he got rid of his hangover, the sooner he could get some work done. He had a lot of reading to do today.

An ordinary American citizen, on a lazy Sunday morning with nothing to do, might have washed the car or gone for a walk or put something in the oven for dinner that night. Stan Pines did none of that. Instead, he washed his breakfast dishes, had a brief shower, changed his clothes and went down to the basement.

The portal always seemed like it was waiting for him as he stepped out of the elevator and into the enormous cavern under the house. It wasn’t, he knew that. That hunk of machinery and metal was quite dead and had been for months. But that didn’t change the fact that he felt like the damn thing was looking at him, as if the hole in the middle was a single, glaring eye. Sneering down at him, mocking his efforts. There was something about the way it sat, alone in the hollow of rock, like it wasn’t a machine but some ancient statue to a forgotten geometric god. It gave Stan the creeps.

He tried to put it out of his mind as he sat down at a makeshift desk he had set up next to one of the control consoles that festooned the walls of the cave. A book, a dusty hardback volume that babbled about relativity and quantum mechanics and space-time curvature, sat open on the desk, covered in pencilled-in scribblings. Two different hands were responsible for the annotations that ran up and down the book’s margins. There was the smooth, confident cursive of Ford’s handwriting, flagging up interesting theories and aspects to investigate further. And there was the crabbed scrawl of his own hand, finding fifteen different ways per page to say ‘I don’t understand a word of this’.

Stan ran a hand through his hair and tried not to think about how many grey hairs he had seen up there in the mirror earlier. He no longer looked like a man in his late twenties. Stress and bad living were conspiring to make him look ten years older than his age.

Outside, the bright morning became a blisteringly hot July noon. Below thirty feet of bedrock, the air remained cool and damp. Stan Pines kept on staring at the book, trying to understand the science behind the machine that loomed at his back as if it was peering over his shoulder.

Slowly, by degrees, he fell asleep.

 

* * *

 

For the second time that day, Stan Pines woke. This time, however, he opened his eyes not on his bed, nor the sofa, but somewhere entirely unexpected.

He was stood – not lying, strangely enough – in the middle of a large open space, that gave the impression of being part of a cathedral or mansion or some similar enormous stonework building. Soaring pillars supported a glass cupola beyond which seemed to be nothing but blackness, like a starless night. The floor beneath his feet was a mesh of tessellating octagonal tiles, alternating black and white. Between the pillars, stretching off in all directions, enormous vaulted corridors ran away from him, their walls clad from floor to roof with shelves and shelves of books. He was in the hub of what seemed like the world’s largest library.

Stan allowed himself a moment of confusion before realising he must still be dreaming. That was unusual. It wasn’t like him to dream in the first place – Ford had always been the one who kept diaries and tried to lucid dream – and it certainly wasn’t like him to dream of something so unusual. Most of his dreams these days involved returning to his father’s house with a bag of money, or casting off from a pier on the deck of a gleaming boat, or sometimes an all-night, rubber-to-the-road session to help fix his brother’s science project after a cringingly awkward and guilty phone call that he was glad for the rest of his life he had made.

Still, if this was a dream, there was little that he could do until he woke up. Idly he wandered over towards the nearest shelf – and stopped dead when a voice rang through the air above him.

“Well, well, _well._ What do we have here, eh?”

Stan jumped and looked up in confusion. His mouth flopped open in surprise as he saw what was descending towards him.

It almost looked like the portal. But bright yellow and point-up, with a single beady eye staring out of it above what seemed to be a neatly knotted bow tie. The strange apparition dropped out of the gloomy heights above him and came to a halt neatly at Stan’s eye level, doffing its bizarre top hat and spinning a tiny cane as it did so.

“What… the…” was all Stan managed to murmur.

“My, my! It _has_ been a while since we had someone like you in here!” the thing trilled.

“Who… who are-”

“Me? I’m Bill! Bill Cipher! And welcome to The Library!” The way the thing said it, you could hear the capitalisations on ‘The Library’.

“The Library? Of what?”

“Everything, friend, everything! Everything that was and is and, indeed, ever will be…” – the thing made an expansive gesture with its tiny arms – “…is contained in here. This is the font of all knowledge!”

Stan visibly deflated. Definitely just another dream. He knew how this would go down: he’d find the knowledge on how to operate the portal with the help of this strange little creature, and he’d be so filled with happiness and relief, right up until he woke up with nothing but a head full of empty air-

Bill reached over and prodded his cane at Stan. A small jolt of electricity jumped the gap between the cane’s tip and Stan’s nose, and Stan yelped in shock and jumped backwards. “What the hell?” he demanded, rubbing his nose. “That hurt!”

“Sure did, Stan, sure did. So now you know you’re not dreaming, right?”

“I… wait, what?” Stan’s mind reeled at what the thing was implying. “You mean this place is… is real?”

“Oh, now, well, _real_ is a tricky word, Stan Pines,” Bill said. “It exists, for sure.”

Stan had no desire to argue metaphysics with something that looked like it should be a mascot for a restaurant chain. There were other things he was more interested in. “How do you know my name?” he asked. “And for that matter, what _are_ you?”

“I’m the Librarian, Stan Pines!” Bill cried, throwing his cane in the air and catching it. “Of course I know your name! I know lots of things!”

The way he said _lots of things_ made the hairs on Stan’s back stand on end.

“Knew your brother, too,” Bill added nonchalantly.

Stan felt his heart skip a beat. “You knew Ford?” he gasped.

“Of course I did! You see, Mullet,” – Stan blinked in confusion at his sudden new nickname – “when people want to know something, truly desperately want to know something, they have a habit of finding their way here one way or another. Your brother came here a lot over the years.”

“Ford came _here_?”

“Where else would your world’s biggest nerd have gone when he needed a helping hand?” Bill chuckled. “He came here all the time!” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “In fact, just between the two of us, let me tell you something, Mullet. Your brother wouldn’t have been half the smarty-pants he was without what he found in here.”

“What?” All Stan seemed to have been doing since this thing started talking was try to keep up. He tried to get a hold on the conversation as best he could. “You mean…”

“Oh, he was always a sharp one, but without a little outside help I don’t think he’d ever have been the Einstein he grew up to be,” Bill said with a shrug, leaving no doubts as to where Ford’s alleged ‘outside help’ had come from. “But that’s in the past now, Stan. What’s important is that I can give you some of that same help, if you agree to do something for me.”

By the sounds of it the creature wanted to make some sort of deal with him. This was instantly familiar territory to Stan. Deals, especially dodgy ones, had become a specialty over his ten long years on the road. “Such as?” he asked with a mistrustful look and folded arms.

“Oh, Stan, why the suspicion?” Bill cried. “I’m not some two-bit shyster! I want to help you! But hey, quid pro quo, one hand washes the other, and all that.”

“So what do you want?”

“Just your help with something. A little project I’ve been working on in my spare time. Look, Stan, we can work out the details later – right now, the question is, do you want my help or not?”

Bill stuck his hand out, his one eye creasing into an approximation of a friendly smile. “Take it or leave it, Mullet.”

Stan wanted his brother back more than words could describe. And if this thing was on the level – and if this wasn’t all just some cruel dream – then this might be the best chance he was going to get. And yet…

“You know, your brother talked about you a lot,” Bill said, his hand still outstretched. A faint blue haze seemed to be wafting off his palm. “Said he missed you. Said he wished you two hadn’t parted on such bad terms.”

His words were like a knife to Stan’s gut.

“Said he was sorry,” Bill added.

A lump of ice seemed to momentarily replace Stan’s spine – and then, when he thought about what the creature had said, it was replaced with a feeling of something that was almost relief.

To Bill’s immense surprise, Stan’s face creased, cracked, and then he dissolved in a fit of laughter.

“Huh? What’s so funny?” he demanded, squinting in confusion at the man almost bent double and wheezing in front of him. “Don’t you want to see your-”

“You really didn’t know Ford that well, did you?” Stan gasped in between sniggers. “You didn’t know him _at all_.”

“I did!” Bill protested.

“You almost had me!” Stan chuckled, looking around appraisingly at the library he was stood in. “With all your talk of libraries of knowledge and helping people out. I was ready to believe it for a second, I really was. But you slipped up, _Bill_ ,” he snarled, like the name was a curse. “You told me two things that sure as hell aren’t true. Number one, you told me my brother needed _any_ help to be the genius he is. And number two, you told me he missed me.”

His grin slipped and his expressing became hard and cruel. “And neither of those sound like Stanford Pines to me. Not the brother I grew up with, and certainly not the asshole who greeted me six months ago. So to hell with you Bill, and to hell with your ‘deal’. I’m enough of a con man to know when I’m being hustled, and I know you’re trying to hustle me now. I’ll get Ford back on my own!”

“You’re making a mistake, Mullet,” Bill growled, his voice deepening. “A big mistake.”

“No, Bill. You made the mistake, when you pretended to know my brother better than I do,” Stan snarled. “Now _get lost._ ”

“Fine. _Fine._ ” Bill hissed, retracting his hand at last. His eye twisted in fury. “Have it your way. But don’t come crying to me when everything goes topsy-turvy! You think you can work that portal on your own? You? Ha! You’ll hit a rut, you’ll run out of steam, and when you do…”

A thousand Bill Cipher’s suddenly seemed to be speaking in unison. “ _I’ll be watching you!”_

There was a brief sensation of the place he was in disintegrating – glass cracking, stone shattering, billions of books tearing open to reveal nothing but blank pages – and then all Stan knew was oblivion.

 

* * *

 

When Stan awoke, back in the cavern under his brother’s house, his head was slumped across the textbook he had been reading from and the hands on his watch read a half past three. He groaned, yawned and stood up to stretch his back.

The portal watched him with its impassive stare, creaking quietly to itself as the metal in it settled and shifted. Stan returned its gaze with something approaching defiance. He saw Bill’s outlines in the machine’s construction now, and wondered just how well Ford had known that strange, deceitful little thing.

 _You can’t hold him forever_ , he thought as he stared down that sightless eye. _I’m getting him back.  
_

It might have been his imagination, but on the wind that sometimes blew through the cavern, between little cracks and fissures in the rock, he thought he heard a laugh.


End file.
